Patents

With our technical background and many years of experience, we can support you with all services around patents.

Obtaining a patent

You can protect your technical innovations, also called inventions, with a patent. Your invention is patentable when it is new and non-obvious. This allows you to prevent your technical innovations from being copied by your competitors and to protect your investments you made in R&D. We accompany you from the beginning to the end of the lifetime of a patent.

An optional patentability search allows us to find out if your invention is patentable. This avoids useless costs for a patent filing, if the invention is not patentable. It allows us further to draft the patent protection better in the light of the closest state of the art and strengthen the protection obtained by your patent.

We draft the patent application for you and handle all administrative steps for you, such as for example filing the patent application, dealing with notifications from the patent offices, paying necessary fees, etc.  

Enforcing your patent

If your patent is infringed by your competitor or other third party, we support you to stop the infringement or to claim damages. We normally try to avoid time-consuming and costly court proceedings by finding an agreement with the infringing party. If court actions cannot be avoided, we support you in getting your claims before the respective court.

Defending yourself against patents of third parties

Patents of third parties can become a severe threat for your business, if they block you from selling one of your products.

We perform searches for patents in your field to evaluate a risk of patent infringement. We do also periodical surveillances of new patents in your field to reduce the risk of any future surprises.

We analyse identified dangerous patents to evaluate the risk for an infringement by your product and to find reasons for the nullity of the patent.

We support you with oppositions and nullity procedures against patents which are a potential threat for your business. This gives to you the legal certainty to do your business and often avoids a patent infringement process in the future, if the opposition or nullity action was successful.

We also support you in the case that you have been accused of a patent infringement.

Utility models

Utility models or non-examined patents are an interesting alternative to patents which allow sometimes to get a fast and/or cheap protection for a certain product. In some countries, utility models allow further to get a protection for inventions which would not be patentable with a patent. The above-mentioned services apply analogously to utility models.